It was quite the weekend for the husband-and-wife tandem of Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively.
Reynolds, the snarky mastermind behind the Deadpool movies, can still celebrate being atop the box office. He and Hugh Jackman’s Deadpool & Wolverine won the box-office title for the third straight weekend, collecting an estimated $54.2 million in North America en route. Deadpool & Wolverine has earned nearly $500 million in domestic markets ($494.3 million, to be exact). Add in the movie’s international take, and Deadpool & Wolverine has banked more than $1 billion worldwide.
But Lively’s own film—It Ends With Us—nearly toppled the superhero flick, earning $50 million to finish a close second. And the female-centric drama actually bested Deadpool & Wolverine on Friday, presumably earning Lively a measure of bragging rights at the Reynolds-Lively home. According to People, Reynolds and Lively are the first husband-and-wife duo to finish one-two at the box office since 1990. (Back then, it was Bruce Willis’ Die Hard 2 and Demi Moore’s Ghost jousting for the top spot.) It Ends with Us also earned $30 million overseas this weekend, bringing its grand total to $80 million.
Compared with those two Tinseltown titans, everything else at the box office was a mere afterthought.
That’s bad news for Borderlands, another newcomer looking to spoil Deadpool & Wolverine’s ongoing party. Featuring a bevy of stars (including Oscar winners Cate Blanchett and Jamie Lee Curtis), a blockbuster videogame tie-in and a $115 million budget, Borderlands was supposed to be a late-summer hit. Yeah, about that: The movie—which also featured an impressive explosion-to-runtime ratio—bombed, earning a measly $8.8 million to finish fourth, well behind third-place Twisters ($15 million). The latter film has now earned $222.3 million during its monthlong run.
Despicable Me 4 closed out the top five with $8 million, pushing its own domestic tally to a very un-despicable $330.1 million.
One more film to note: Cuckoo, a very strange coming-of-age horror story, debuted in ninth place with $3 million.
One Response
Someone elsewhere brought up that “Borderlands” chose to come out during end-of-summer vacations when kids are getting ready to head back to school, plus with how Mature the games were, it wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of parents didn’t know the movie was only rated PG-13 and assumed it, like its source material, wouldn’t be suitable for young teens. A longtime friend of mine I’ve played games with for about a decade, solidly within the film’s target demographic, abhorred it like few other movies I’ve ever heard him talk about except for the Hellboy 2019 film.